4 Bold Predictions For 2024

Will there be World War 3? Will there be an economic depression? Are you going to own nothing and be happy? 2023 was a crazy year and 2024 might be even weirder. In this video I'm going to tell you what's actually going to happen in 2024 in the economy, in E Commerce, and how it's going to affect your money. Let's start with the economy. I think we've all experienced that the economy feels a little bit softer right now than it did back in the boom of 2021 and 2022. Interest rates are at like a billion percent right now. Although the Federal Reserve did announce that they think they're done raising interest rates and they think they'll be cutting interest rates in 2024. That means that they think that they've won the fight against inflation, I think, and I predict that that fight is going to take longer than most of us hope. I think that the Fed will mostly hold on their interest rates in 2024. If they do reduce rates, it'll be small. It'll be a half a point. Throughout 2024. I don't think that we will see serious interest rate cuts because inflation is going to be a little bit stubborn above 2%. What that means is that we'll probably still have some economic softness and we won't have this red hot economy that we saw in 2021 and 2022. In fact, I think it will even be a little bit softer than it was in 2023. To make this really simple, I think that we will see a mild recession in 2024. It'll be short and it will be not very painful, but we will see a slowdown in the economy. We're not going to have this falling off a cliff that a lot of people have predicted. We're not going to see another total meltdown of markets. But we are going to see a slowdown because interest rates are going to stay high. And since they're staying high, that means that there's going to be more layoffs. It means that there's going to be less opportunities to find new jobs. It means there's not going to be cheap money at all this year. We're going to have an entire year of just holding the line. And they have to do that in order to continue to bring down inflation and for prices to come back to normal levels for mainstream Americans. Until that happens, which is going to take, I think, throughout the entire year, we're not going to have another economic boom. And I don't See that happening until 2026, maybe even 2027. What that means for you is that now is a really good time to be planting long term seeds. I think we have about a two to three year window right now where it's a really good idea to be thinking long term and planting for that next cycle. That means starting business. It means investing for the long term. And, and if you were to hear a lot of the conversations that I have with wealthy entrepreneurs, all of them that were riding the run up a couple of years ago are getting kicked in the teeth right now. And we all look at each other and say, man, wouldn't you love to be starting right now? Right now would be such a great time to start because all of our peers are getting punched in the face and dealing with all these fires and challenges. But if you were starting right now, there's so much opportunity in real estate investing, in entrepreneurship, in e commerce, in content creation. Now is such a good time to start the thing that you're thinking about getting into because all of the big players are really beat up right now. The sector that I think will boom in 2024 is crypto technology. This doesn't mean speculating on Dogecoin or Ripple or even Bitcoin. This means, I think that the companies who have been investing in blockchain and crypto for the last couple of years are going to see their, their window. They're going to see their time of growth in 2024. Those are companies like PayPal which I think is super underpriced right now. Even Visa, which has made investments in crypto technology, Coinbase. It's my opinion that the up and coming generation is going to prefer getting their payments in things like bitcoin and Ethereum versus the US dollar. And if you have payment gateways like Venmo, PayPal, Square that allow you to transact person to person, but also have a layer of blockchain where you can get paid in Bitcoin and Ethereum. I think the companies that make that possible and easy for the up and coming entrepreneurial generation, I think they're going to have a really good time. Let's talk about E commerce. This is where I specialize. This is where I help entrepreneurs the most. This is where I invest in my capitalism fund. Because I teach the E Commerce model of getting four products to 25 sales a day at a $30 price point. That's a million dollar business. That's where I'm interested in investing in an entrepreneur, mentoring them and helping them grow to a $10 million exit. I see two major changes happening in the e commerce world in 2024. Number one, I see the emergence of new platforms. For the first time in a long time. I think that we'll see the opportunity to strike on marketplaces that are not called Amazon.com in fact, there are four that I'm paying attention to right now. The first is TikTok shop. This one seems obvious to me. TikTok is making major investments into making it easy for people to buy right on the platform. And if you're already following somebody and they hold up this shirt that they just love and you can click a button and buy it, it makes all the sense in the world that people will do their impulse shopping on TikTok because they're already spending time there. The second is a platform called Temu. Temu is basically eliminating the third party marketplace where they just have the suppliers in China listing directly. And so you can order bulk, you can order one product and it's super cheap. Now right now, the products on there are mostly crap, but it's a very interesting emerging platform where they're doing a very modern thing of eliminating the middleman, eliminating the third party. And you have all of these suppliers who are listing directly for consumers to shop there. The third is that I think Facebook is going to try to compete with TikTok Shop. So you will have an Instagram shop or you will have meta shopping. Historically, Facebook waits for other people, other platforms to create a feature and then they copy it. And we saw this with threads in 2023. Facebook waits for somebody else to do something innovative and then they just copy it. And so when TikTok shop starts to get some real exposure, I think Facebook will also release their own marketplace. And the fourth is Walmart.com, which has been trying to figure out e commerce forever, but they haven't been able to nip at the heels of Amazon. If, however, you have other platforms who are starting to grow, I think some of that attention will drip over onto Walmart.com so 2024 will be the year when we have other alternatives to Amazon.com, and there will be new businesses that get launched and do seven and eight figures in sales just as the result of being exposed on those new platforms. The second trend that is going to be common in e commerce is the emergence of the e commerce conglomerate. Now, if you remember 2020 and 2021, we had this thing called the Amazon aggregator. This was when you had people raising a boatload of money to buy Businesses that were selling things on Amazon.com and most of them went to zero. If you were an actual player in the e commerce space, you saw this writing on the wall from a mile away. The business model was completely broken because it was built on a platform, meaning it was dependent on Amazon in order for all of this money to be deployed. It was a terrible business model. However, since all of those aggregators have gone out of business, you now have businesses that can be acquired for far less money than a couple of years ago. The valuations on e commerce businesses and brands are actually very normal and healthy right now. That means that there will be an opportunity for conglomerates to come up and buy real brands. What's the difference between a conglomerate and an aggregator? You can think of a conglomerate like Procter and Gamble or Unilever. This is where they have strong brands in their portfolio that are focused on creating new great products and going out and buying other businesses as well. An aggregator just focuses on the platform. That would be like today, going out and just buying up influencers who are selling things on TikTok. It's a terrible business idea, but there will be some businesses that come out of that new opportunity and become real businesses, become real brands. And in five years they might be worth buying. That's where conglomerates come in. So I think you will see mature conglomerates get started in this era and they will buy up the good brands that win on Amazon, Shopify and the new emerging platforms. Let's talk about politics. Why not? What's gonna happen in the 2024 election? I don't fucking know. Trump is a shoo in unless he goes to jail. But if he goes to jail, there's gonna be riots. And mostly nobody wants both of these candidates to run. They want some other option. So what the heck happens? This is kind of unprecedented. There's two things that I think will happen though. Number one, I think RFK Jr will be in at least one of the debates. This will be the first time that a third party candidate will be in the debates since Ross Perot. Now can he win? No. But will he be in the conversation? I think for at least part of the time. I think we will have a conversation about three options for maybe the first time in 20 years. And my hope is that this ushers in a cycle where maybe we're talking about three or four options on the stage. That's my hope. I've been hoping for the end of the two party system for a long time. And my one dark horse hope is that we get a third option in there and it opens up a new conversation. The second thing that I predict will happen in politics is that we see the end of Wokeness, or at least the beginning of the end. We hit peak wokeness, everybody. It's not cool to divide people into groups and judge each other anymore. It's okay to be funny in stand up comedy now. It's not cool for brands to take a stand for a specific group and against another group. We've peaked. The bullish cycle of Wokeness is over. We're now in bear market territory on Wokeness and I think we're going to loosen up the grips a little bit on judging everybody for all of their past sins. Let's talk about entrepreneurship. And first we're going to start with AI. How is AI going to affect our lives, our companies and our businesses? I have a different opinion than what is common out there about artificial intelligence. And I don't believe that there is going to be an AI boom. I do not think that there is going to be a chat GPT like company that comes on the market and reaches a huge valuation. I think it's going to be much more distributed than that. I don't think there's going to be a few AI companies that win. I just think people are going to use AI much more. So what this means is that it will be more normal, almost necessary for all creative jobs to understand AI as a technology, just like you have to understand the Internet as a technology. I see ChatGPT kind of like AOL. It's the first technology and everyone uses it. And after a while it's not going to matter what Internet service you used. Use AOL or Yahoo or msn. I don't think we will even have a conversation about what the AI tool is. It'll just be so ingrained in our lives that it's like a fish in water. And that means that if you're a content creator, you've got to use certain technologies that allow you to edit and produce your content better. If you're a copywriter, you're going to use AI tools that make it faster and easier for you to write copy. This is going to be the case for pretty much all creative jobs, which means that we're going to have smaller teams. That is a deflationary sign. That means that there will be layoffs. That means that there will be people moving into different sectors. It means that there will be downward pressure on the economy as a result of AI growing. But I don't think that it is going to be a big boom with one or two businesses winning. It's just going to be distributed among everyone using it and it's going to be a normal and natural part of our lives. And this leads me to a change I see happening in the entrepreneurial space as a whole. This is the first time in about 15 years that I can remember where there's no obvious white space. Meaning there was a while that content creation was wide open and you could make content and come out of nowhere, or you could bet on a cryptocurrency and win, or you could sell something on Amazon, the world's flatter now. There's no obvious white space right now. And that means that this is the time when merit wins out. The one white space that I do see is in relationships, because it has been so easy to win on your own by selling things on Amazon, creating content on TikTok, building a YouTube channel. You could win on your own and you didn't really need to collaborate with other people. Now that you've had some maturation of the space, you've had some consolidation around audiences. This is where collaborations become cool. And so I think you'll see an emergence of things like affiliate marketing, or creating deep long term relationships with people in your space. Or what we used to call, in the Internet marketing circle, we called it a syndicate. I think you will see this return as a trend. What is a syndicate? A syndicate is when you've got a podcast and you've got nine buddies with a podcast and all 10 of you promote one another. You do spots on each other's shows and it's almost like a mini mastermind group where you're growing each other's platforms so that all of you can win together. The same is true in affiliate marketing. You've got a product and you've got nine people that you also promote, and they promote each other. So I think you will see more collaborations because we've gotten lax at building relationships, we've gotten lacks at building collaboration, and that's actually where there's opportunity right now. Now let's talk about something that I Hope happens in 2024. Over the last couple of years, the way that you got attention in the world was by being different, by standing out, by being more controversial than the next person, by being flashier than the next person. But we have seen that sort of flatten out. There's now so many millionaires, people like me, creating all this content on YouTube and even billionaires creating content, writing books, doing YouTube videos, doing interviews that now it is not shocking anymore to be flashy. Instead, in 2023, it was popular and flashy to be nasty to people. So you saw the rise of the old school shock jock, the person who made content that was just shocking and controversial for controversy's sake. And that's what got attention. But now even that, that is waning. And so what are you left with? If you can't be flashy and get attention, if you can't show skin and get attention, if you can't be mean to people and get attention, the only thing that's left is going to be true uniqueness and authenticity. My hope is that you see more Mr. Beasts, more Jimmy Darts, more people who are being authentic and kind in the world, and that's actually what wins out. Of course, from about September through November, we're going to go through a period where everybody hates each other. And I hope that this is the year that we realize that that just doesn't work anymore. I don't really care who you vote for, but I care very much how you treat the people who vote differently than you. And my hope is that in 2024, as we have this crazy election year, we will finally see that being shocking, being controversial, and being mean to one another is no longer cool. And that's my hope for 2024.

One thing that I used to do that I've sort of grown out of is that I used to try to make predictions for the world as a way to understand it and then place my bets based on those predictions. If I thought that the economy was going to go down, I would hold back on investing. And I lost a lot of money doing that because I missed out on the times when I was wrong. Or if I thought that there was going to be worldwide chaos, I would shrink and not be bullish on my business. And I could have grown a lot faster if I had ignored that and just bet on things expanding and bet on optimism. And regardless of what other people say about what is going to happen in 2024, I want you to remember that over time, things tend to get better. And I think that we're in a window of about two to three years where most of the world is going to be resting on their heels, is going to be a little bit soft and a little bit scared. And my hope for you is that you use this window of opportunity to double down and to build the business that you actually want to bring to the world. And if you want some help, you can find resources. In the description of this video. I'm ryan Danielman with capitalism.com. thank you for watching. I'd love to hear what you think is going to happen in 2024. Just drop a comment below and I'll interact with you there. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next.

Time.